Estimated reading time: 16 minutes
Dear Dr. NerdLove,
I’m a 33-year-old hetero cis white guy trying to find some semblance of happiness in my love life. I’ve been single for nearly 3 years now. Apart from some dating attempts ranging from making a new friend or two, to 1-night stands… it’s felt like an emotional endeavor. Either I feel like shit when I find out that said person would like to be friends and then find out later they’re dating someone else OR just realize that said person was looking for some action (which, tbf, I’m guilty of that at times too and realize how unhealthy that is and have stopped doing that).
I’m jealous of my last ex-gf who started dating one of my best friends (nothing toxic there, we’re all really good with each other and they seem happier than they did with me) and I do think I have anger issues that I try to fix or resolve in regards, too (though she had boundary & control issues, since I wasn’t entirely happy with her either). But now I don’t know if I will find someone that I can live with. Like I don’t want to be single and it feels like there’s a distinct possibility that may wake up one day at 40 when I’ve been trying to find someone and just fall into a deeper depression and realize I may never find someone I can fall in love with again. Especially while being relatively young.
I’ve tried to distract myself from these thoughts (even the self-harm kind when I think I’ll never be able to fall in love again) by working out at the gym and see if I can go from 240 lbs to 200 lbs at 6’3″ (trying for 5 months) and also hanging out w/ friends more in person. But I feel like these might be temporary distractions while my heart aches to be with someone I can be sweet and affectionate with again in earnestness and not as an obligation. I’ve even uninstalled my dating apps since they’ve proved fruitless and even counterproductive. Like itching at scabs on a rash.
I don’t think that I’ve been doing anything wrong, but I’m more critical of myself than others do and I usually think I fucked up something with my body language or even conversation. I also tend to overthink and have low social battery. Idk if I should stay away from the dating scene for a bit or if I need to look at it differently.
I’m just scared of being alone with no one to share each other’s thoughts and feelings. And now I feel like I’m regressing. Like maybe it is better for me to shut up and keep my thoughts and feelings to myself, since no one cares and that I better get used to disappointment and maybe being single for the rest of my days. Which is when my depression gets in the way and… yeah. It just bites and I would do anything to find someone I can feel loved by as much as I would love them.
Somebody To Love
OK, this is going to sound weird coming from someone who is literally in the business of helping people fix their love lives or get better at finding relationships but… you need to change your relationship to, well, relationships, STL. What you’re dealing with is turning finding Someone To Love into the alpha and omega of your life, and that’s actually getting in the way of actually finding people.
I realize this seems contradictory; after all, why would being intent on the search mean that you’re making it worse for yourself? But it’s less about the search and more about how the frustration affects you, and changes your ideas of what you’re looking for and how you’re looking. Once you start seeing finding a romantic partner as the ultimate and only point of your life, you start to get way more hung up on the goal and not on things like “what kind of life do I want to have and who would be the right person to share that life with me?” You get tunnel vision, you put incredible pressure on yourself to make this relationship work and then beat yourself up when it doesn’t. Before long, you start hitting the “someone, anyone, everyone” stage where you’re no longer looking for the right person but just someone to slot into that hole marked “relationship”.
And to make matters worse, you start to optimize your life around “find a relationship”. Which again, seems contradictory; why would optimization like that work against you? And the answer is: because optimization for “find a relationship” doesn’t work. It’s a lot like in live-service games like Diablo 4 or DOTA, where there’s a “meta” for playing the game and building out character classes, skill set and equipment – the One Way you need to spec out your character in order to “win”. But this means that you no longer can experiment, play around, find little odd combos that may not be the most efficient or “best” way to play but that you enjoy anyway because it makes the game fun for you. You have to play in this very specific way, follow this very specific route and give up on the idea that you’re going to have an individual experience.
So it is with getting overly focused on finding a relationship and making everything else secondary to this. It ignores the rich diversity of experience and wonder and joy of discovery and possibilities of serendipity. Dating should be fun. Relationships are supposed to be enjoyable, a process where you not only learn about other people but the ways that those people teach you things about yourself you might never have expected and expose you to new possibilities and interests and options.
You’re running into this mindset already when you say “I feel like these are temporary distractions” about spending time with your friends. When you think of this as a distraction and not a goal or outcome in and of itself, you end up devaluing the point of spending time with your friends. It reinforces the idea that friendship is less special, less meaningful and less important than romantic love. Hell, your friends are precisely the people you should be sharing your thoughts and feelings with, just as they should be sharing their thoughts and feelings with you. That’s part of why we have friends; they’re siblings we choose, not substitutes for romance.
Spending time with your friends isn’t a “distraction”, something to keep you from feeling things you don’t want to feel; it’s part of how you live a richer, fuller life, how you bring more emotional intimacy and connection into it.
The same goes for working out. Working out and losing weight is all well and good. Taking care of your body and ensuring that its working properly and in good order are all important things. But if you’re trying to get in shape, not because you enjoy what exercise does for you and your health but in hopes of optimizing your chances of finding a baddie, you’re putting yourself on a metaphorical treadmill where you will forever be chasing something that is just out of reach and leaving you more and more exhausted.
The thing you want to be doing isn’t trying to ignore or distract yourself from feeling things. You want to be enriching your life in a myriad number of ways. When is the last time you went to a museum and saw something that showed you the transformative power of art? When was the last time you went to see live music and had a transcendent experience with other people? When is the last time you lost yourself to the beat and danced with abandon or took your energy, blood, sweat and time and created something tangible and physical in the world, something that wasn’t there before?
These aren’t distractions. These are fulfillments. They’re things that make your life worth living, things that remind you why we’re alive and happy to be so. And those are experiences that make life worth sharing with another person, when the right person comes around. Trying to find the person and then find those experiences is doing it all backwards.
All of this is part of what leads to your overthinking and feeling like a person not clicking with you is a failure on your part, rather than just someone not being right for you. You’re treating this as a math problem when it’s a personal essay. You’re in your head because you’re thinking and plotting and planning when you should be experiencing, trying to optimize when you should be connecting and getting curious.
You are so focused on getting your life in a place where you can fill that void, you end up ignoring and neglecting the things that make your life enjoyable and worth sharing with another person. People aren’t optimized; we’re complex, messy, full of what seems like pointless spaghetti code that makes no sense and that’s what makes us beautiful. The mess, the cruft, the things that seem irrelevant to the process of “find a partner” are all the weird little idiosyncrasies that make us special and interesting and fun. To try to make everything about finding a relationship is to neglect the love of your life in order to find the love of your life.
You need to go out and be messy, not optimized and perfect. Go have conversations with strangers just because they seem interesting, not because you’re hoping it will lead to dating someone. Go collect experiences and share them with your friends, find adventures that all of you can take together. Explore the hidden corners and side-streets of your town and find the little secrets you never knew were there. Do things that expand your horizons and feed your soul, just because.
These are the things that will help you recharge your emotional batteries and remind you why you’re alive. They’ll be what push back the suffocating clouds of depression and banish the overthinking because you will be doing, experiencing, not thinking and analyzing. You will be reminding yourself the thing that makes you the most attractive and desirable as partner is just being fun to be with because you are out enjoying your life. You will be creating a larger attack surface for serendipity to reach you, making it more possible for love to happen.
A person who is living a life they truly enjoy and love is magnetic. Other people are drawn to that sense of purpose and fulfilment and joy of discovery, in no small part because they will want to know what it’s like to experience it themselves. And just as many will be drawn to you because those are the experiences and values that they share, the things that are important to them.
But those are things you have to choose for their own sake, not because they play to the meta of “How To Find A Partner”. You need to be willing to embrace that joie de vivre with a whole and willing heart. It’s how you’ll make it more possible to find someone who will share theirs with you.
Good luck.
Dear Dr. NerdLove: I am currently in a relationship for the last 5 months. Feelings came extremely fast and deep. I’ve always known my feelings and have always been very blunt when expressing them. We have a 26yr age difference between us. I’ve never looked at age as a number when it comes to love. I am currently pregnant with his child, and we have had some misunderstanding and miscommunication already. I also have left for about a month to give us a break to figure out our true wants. I was the one keeping contact during the break. He would respond but I was the one initiating.
When I came back, I messed up really bad n went thru his phone, well I went thru specific texts from a certain person in his past. And now I feel like I ruined us, because what I found won’t get outta my head. I confronted him immediately and it became such a huge argument. He calmed me down we talked but didn’t truly resolve anything because I started feeling sick w morning sickness. So, as the days have gone by, I find myself having moments of blowouts because something will remind me of what I read n I get so upset I tell him I don’t want him anymore, but knowing that’s a lie and am just trying to run from it due to fear of losing him anyways, so might as well push him away first right??
I know, stupid as fuck for me to even be letting this conspire this way. But I’m gonna be 100% honest. I feel like I fucked up by one violating his trust two allowing my past issues ruin my present.
Well let me go back real quick, the texts were to his ex about Me. He was dogging me so bad, calling me names telling her to come and beat my ass. Completely just disrespecting me to her. Saying I’m a bitch and have issues I came to his life trying to control him. And that he kicked me outta his house n things in that nature.
When I confronted him, he immediately went into defense saying he trusted me around his phone and I violated it. Then said everything he said was before the break and before he knew he loved me. But, he lied because some of the dates where after I left and then he said he hadn’t had contact since he realized he love me. Another lie, he then said he would cut contact, if that’s what I want. But then when on saying he didn’t wanna burn a bridge w her!! Like really wtf does that mean and why the fuck not?? I asked him why, he said he had some unfinished business as far as her name on titles of his boat n stuff like that. I then asked him to at least let her know how he truly feels about if he loves me to tell her that since all he’s done is talk bad about me. And also let her know I’m pregnant with his baby. He went on to say he doesn’t feel she needs to know his business. I feel that’s bs and a cop out, due to he still loves her and truly doesn’t wanna let her go.
Am I over reacting and should I just let it go and stay with him. Or are my feelings valid and should I stop now before it goes any further n I keep hurting my heart??
Unbreak My Heart
This is going to be a rough one, UMH. I know it’s not what you’re going to want to hear, but I think it’s going to be necessary.
Here’s the thing about snooping: it’s a violation of consent and trust, and most of the time you will either learn that you violated that trust for no reason, or you will learn things that you will later wish you never learned. Sometimes, not always but sometimes, you will discover things that you needed to know, things that retroactively justify that snooping. But that’s not a guarantee; far more often, you will find things that you just won’t be able to unlearn or unknow, and those sit with you like lead in your heart and soul.
And that’s precisely what happened here. You saw stuff that you wish you hadn’t seen – things he said while he was upset and angry, sure, but still things that he clearly felt in the moment. Now you can’t not know those things and those thoughts keep coming up for you, and will continue to do so.
That’s part of the price you pay when you go snooping, regardless of what you find. Once you’re at the point of snooping into someone’s stuff, you’re starting the countdown clock to the end of the relationship; the only reason is why.
I’ll be blunt: this relationship needs to end. Honestly, I don’t think it should’ve reached this point in the first place, and I think it should’ve ended before there was a baby on the way that ties the two of you together for a minimum of 18 years. Those communication issues and misunderstandings were an early the warning sign, especially since they never actually got resolved. If anything, they seem to have gotten worse over time and aren’t showing signs of improving in the future. It seems that this latest incident has shown the fault lines that were always present in this relationship and laying bare the fact that I don’t think the two of you are right for one another or good for each other. And to be frank, this is a mutual issue.
I will be honest here: I don’t think venting one’s frustration to a friend or an ex about one’s partner validates the snooping after the fact. People are allowed to have outlets for their feelings, even when those feelings are unpleasant or ugly. I think the way he frames things are troubling – I take a hard side-eye to things like “come over and beat her ass for me” even when it’s hyperbole – but overall, it sounds like someone who’s upset and frustrated and who ultimately doesn’t seem to want to be in the relationship but isn’t willing to be the one to call it quits first either. Instead, it seems like he’s taking the passive-aggressive approach of “say stuff but do nothing” to, well, pretty much every conflict you have. There’s a lot of nod-and-agree when you ask things from him (or make demands, more on a second), and then nothing changes because he ultimately just carries on. I suspect that if you hadn’t been proactive about contacting him while you were separated, you like wouldn’t have heard back from him at all.
I also can’t necessarily fault him for being frustrated. I’m a firm believer that having your ex or exes in your life isn’t a warning sign, nor a sign that you still love them or want them back. I’m likewise a big believer that demanding to cut a friend – ex or no – out of your life is a valid deal breaker. However, the way he’s going about things – giving weak and demonstrably bullshit excuses for not ending his relationship with her – is immature and childish; I’d have more respect for a straight up “no, I won’t”, and accepting the consequences. His passive “say whatever makes the fight stop and then do nothing” is immature at best. It’s stubbornness, but without even the courage of admitting that’s what he’s doing.
But at the same time, you’re hanging in here for reasons I don’t fully understand either, outside of not wanting to admit that this relationship is past the point of fixing. You clearly don’t trust him, you aren’t happy with how he’s behaving in this relationship and even if he were to do all the things you’ve told him to do, I don’t think you would feel like you could trust him going forward. I think you would, at best, reach some sort of cease-fire that would last about as long as it took for one of you to trigger the other in some way.
You say that you have past issues that keep coming up and have led you to react the way you have. If I’m being honest, I think all that happened is that your snooping accelerated what was already in motion; I think you both would’ve ended up in, if not this place, some place very similar to it, with more or less the same ultimate outcome. And that’s not great.
It seems pretty clear to me that those issues are still very front and center for you, and I think you really should deal with them before you enter another relationship and make similar mistakes, just with someone else. You’re still hurting and I think that hurt needs to be addressed and tended to, not ignored while hoping that your next relationship – whomever it may be with – won’t trip those emotional landmines. The kindest thing you could do for yourself is to give yourself permission to be single and focus on your own emotional health and well-being, especially with a child on the way.
As it is, I think the best thing you could do, for the both of you, is recognize that this relationship isn’t working and isn’t going to work. I don’t think he’s invested in this the way he would need to be and you are hurt, raw and not in the place where you need to be. Ending things now, before they can get worse, is ultimately the best outcome for the both of you. Ending it now gives you both be best chance of finding or rebuilding at least enough trust and mutual respect to make it possible for the two of you to, if not co-parent, at least both be involved in your child’s life.
Good luck.
